Intergenerational Trauma
Presented by Debra Gill & Vivian Eskin
2 CEUs
Dates: October 30 2026
Time: 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM EST
Fee: $175; $75 for candidates
Intergenerational Trauma: Transmission, Internal Worlds, and Therapeutic Transformation
Abstract
This seminar explores how trauma is transmitted across generations—not through direct narratives or biological mechanisms, but through silence, repetition, narcissistic identification and embodied emotional communication. Inherited trauma affects the internal object world and influences the formation of an internal couple that carries into adult partnerships. Unconscious ties to the suffering from previous generations impair psychic separateness and identity formation. According to Marianne Hirsch, second and third generation Holocaust survivors can unknowingly remain bound to post memory living inside traumas that precede and supersede their own existence.
Relying on case material and relevant theory, we will examine how unmetabolized trauma from previous generations becomes the psychic inheritance of the next generations.
In the treatment situation, we will consider the meaning of the analytic frame, as conceived by José Bleger, for its therapeutic provision of constancy. The analyst provides the steady backdrop that holds unmetabolized trauma until the inevitable disruptions occur, revealing psychotic parts of the personality. These disruptions are essential when what has been hidden and silently carried becomes visible and available for analytic work. Therapeutic witnessing and the analyst's containing function are essential processes through which the therapist gradually metabolizes unprocessed psychic experience. Over time, analytic patients begin to recognize and consider the meaning of inherited trauma, allowing for an emergence of a third position—and in couple work, a couple state of mind, all representing a reflective thinking space where transformation becomes possible through mourning, symbolization, and the creation of new relational life.
Course Objectives
Identify multiple pathways of intergenerational trauma transmission, including biological, narrative, identificatory, and embodied modes, and recognize how silence, repetition, and projective identification function as carriers of inherited suffering in clinical presentation.
Apply concepts of containment, metabolization, and the emergence of the third position to clinical work with individuals and couples carrying traumatic legacy, understanding how the therapist's capacity to process unmetabolized content creates space for symbolization and mourning.
Utilize the analytic frame as a therapeutic instrument to provide constancy while remaining responsive to inevitable disruptions that reveal dissociated or psychotic aspects of personality organization shaped by intergenerational trauma.
